Poetry Exercise: Being Jean Valentine
There's a movie called Being John Malkovich where a puppeteer finds a small door in a wall that lets a person inhabit the mind of the actor John Malkovich for about 15 minutes.
For this prompt, we are going to attempt to inhabit the mind of the late poet Jean Valentine by opening up two of her poems and writing from inside of them.
The first poem:
To get inside this poem, first, write it out by hand on any piece of paper handy. As you write, imagine you're seeing—thinking—as Jean Valentine herself, writing this poem. Imagine each next word you write is a word you chose—what compels that choice? What makes each word the correct word to draw the poem along to its next place?
After you've finished transcribing, read the poem again and consider the argument Jean Valentine is making. The pen is not the instrument crafting the poem, it's not about the ink moving over the page. The pen is "held" in place, while her thought moves around the page. That's what we'll be doing in this prompt.
For the next fifteen minutes (time yourself if you can), you are going to let your thought move around your pen, figuratively speaking. To start, we will take the first line from a second Jean Valentine poem:
Start your timer, and write the words "They lead me to a" at the top of a new page. It should be noted, you cannot write this on a phone or computer. Jean Valentine would never.
Ground your poem by defining a specific place where you are being led, and the specific people who are leading you, then, let the pen be held in place while the world moves with you in it—what is the light like? what other living things do you see? what colors? Let the page be a record of these 15 minutes in as many ways as possible.
Once the timer is up, you do not—like in the movie about John Malkovich—get ejected onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. You have a record of a moment when you were being Jean Valentine. Did the pen move in different ways than you normally would without Jean Valentine's influence? What did that feel like? Are there other poets you admire that you would like to try being?
—Robert Whitehead